As the UK Government readies to include Your First Home in October’s budget review, are housebuilders being thrown a true lifeline marking the end of cost rises, delays and administration announcements?
On the 26th September, the UK Government announced its intention to include ‘Your First Home’, the much-anticipated replacement of the ‘Help to Buy Scheme’ in next month’s budget. A scheme designed to help lower the barrier for first time buyers to get onto the property ladder, Your First Home offers first-time buyers a 2.5% deposit backed by a 20% government equity loan on new-build properties.
This isn’t just great news for first time buyers. It’s a lifeline that many housebuilders have been waiting for.
After a prolonged period of rising costs, stricter planning requirements and announcements of housebuilders collapsing under economic pressure, Your First Homes acts as a significant intervention, designed to stimulate the new build market. But with thousands of construction and real-estates businesses facing insolvency or liquidation in 2026, and several high-profile housebuilders entering into administration, including Devonshire Homes and Agile Property and Homes, is the levy to join the scheme a cost burden housing developers simply cannot afford?
Your First Homes Pay To Play
Your First Home is available to new builds where the developer has signed up to the scheme and is set to become available for first time buyers by the end of 2026. For housing developers to sign up, a ‘contribution’ will be required, a fee which has yet to be outlined but has been reported by the Guardian to be “related to property values to participate, which will contribute to its running costs.”
It is important to note that there wasn’t a contribution from the developers in the last Help to Buy scheme as the equity loan was funded through Homes England.
Whilst housebuilders and the Home Builders Federation (HBF) have welcomed the scheme, much of which has stemmed from the work HBF put forward proposing the need for a repeat of the successful Help To Buy scheme, which ended in March 2023 and increased access to homeownership and boosted housing supply by 15%, the question remains, what will the contribution cost be per dwelling, and how can housebuilders look to offset that cost.
Based on conversations with our housing development sector clients, they seem united with Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s notion that the cost would not be passed on to the buyer, pushing house prices up and nullifying the scheme. Instead, we are hearing our clients are looking to make cost savings in the supply chain, by appointing multidisciplinary suppliers who can tick multiple boxes, adapt and develop with regulatory change and have strong pools of resource to deliver schemes at speed.
Could Supply Chain SME’s Swallow The Contribution Costs For Housebuilders?
The logic of multidisciplinary SME’s in the supply is straightforward. Appointing separate suppliers for topographic surveys, ground investigation, and energy assessments each comes with its own procurement process, its own margin, and its own risk of miscommunication between teams working in silos. Consolidating that work with a single multidisciplinary partner removes duplicated costs, speeds up delivery, and reduces the number of handoffs that can lead to costly delays or design clashes further down the line.
For housebuilders weighing up whether the Your First Home contribution is affordable, these efficiencies could make a meaningful difference. A leaner, better-integrated supply chain could create the kind of saving that adds up across the development pipeline, and could be the difference between a scheme that’s viable and one that isn’t.
Integrated Contributions To Running Home Costs
A further, interesting, knock-on effect is worth considering too. If the contribution is linked to the ongoing running costs of the home, developers will have a vested interest in making that home as energy efficient as possible, while still balancing design and build costs.
Essentially, the scheme could inadvertently create a direct financial incentive for housebuilders to prioritise fabric performance, heating systems, and overall energy efficiency at the design stage, rather than treating it as a compliance box to tick. A more energy-efficient home costs less to run, which in turn could reduce the ongoing contribution liability tied to the property.
I put this to Kyle Jones, our newly appointed Principal Building Performance Consultant at Lucion Survey Ltd, who said:
“If the contribution ends up being tied to a home’s running costs, it changes the conversation. Developers won’t just be thinking about hitting the minimum standard to get through Building Control, they’ll be looking for genuine performance gains that bring that ongoing cost down. That’s where early-stage Standard Assessment Procedures (SAP) and Part O work really earns its keep.
Getting the fabric, heating strategy, and overheating risk right at design stage, rather than retrofitting fixes later, is what actually moves the needle on running costs, without blowing the build budget to do it.”
This is exactly the kind of multidisciplinary efficiency housebuilders are increasingly looking for, an SME partner who can deliver survey, ground engineering, and energy compliance work together, rather than coordinating three separate suppliers on three separate timelines.
If you’re a housing developer looking to find creative ways to absorb the contribution cost of entry ahead of the budget announcement on the 28th October, drop me an email at [email protected] to find out how we can act as your multidisciplinary supplier.
